Show HN: S3mini – Tiny and fast S3-compatible client, no-deps, edge-ready

249 pointsposted 2 days ago
by neon_me
(github.com)

96 Comments

arianvanp

2 days ago

libcurl also has AWS auth with --aws-sigv4 which gives you a fully compatible S3 cliënt without installing anything! (You probably already have curl installed)

impulser_

2 days ago

Yeah, but that will not work on cloudflare, vercel, or any other serverless environment because at most you only have access to node apis.

leerob

2 days ago

Should work on Vercel, you have access to full Node.js APIs in functions.

nodesocket

2 days ago

Somewhat related, I just came across s5cmd[1] which is mainly focused on performance and fast upload/download and sync of s3 buckets.

> 32x faster than s3cmd and 12x faster than aws-cli. For downloads, s5cmd can saturate a 40Gbps link (~4.3 GB/s), whereas s3cmd and aws-cli can only reach 85 MB/s and 375 MB/s respectively.

[1] https://github.com/peak/s5cmd

uncircle

a day ago

I prefer s5cmd as well because it has a better CLI interface than s3cmd, especially if you need to talk with non-AWS S3-compatible servers. It does few things and does them well, whereas s3cmd is a tool with a billion options, configuration files, badly documented env variables, and its default mode of operation assumes you are talking with AWS.

akouri

2 days ago

This is awesome! Been waiting for something like this to replace the bloated SDK Amazon provides. Important question— is there a pathway to getting signed URLs?

nikeee

2 days ago

I've built an S3 client with similar goals like TFA, but supports pre-signing:

https://github.com/nikeee/lean-s3

Pre-signing is about 30 times faster than the AWS SDK and is not async.

You can read about why it looks like it does here: https://github.com/nikeee/lean-s3/blob/main/DESIGN_DECISIONS...

e1g

2 days ago

FYI, you can add browser support by using noble-hashes[1] for SHA256/HMAC - it's a well-done library, and gives you performance that is indistinguishable from native crypto on any scale relevant to S3 operations. We use it for our in-house S3 client.

[1] https://github.com/paulmillr/noble-hashes

neon_me

2 days ago

For now, unfortunately, no - no signed URLs are supported. It wasn't my focus (use case), but if you find a simple/minimalistic way to implement it, I can help you with that to integrate it.

From my helicopter perspective, it adds extra complexity and size, which could maybe be ideal for a separate fork/project?

mannyv

2 days ago

Signed URLs are great because it allows you to allow third parties access to a file without them having to authenticate against AWS.

Our primary use case is browser-based uploads. You don't want people uploading anything and everything, like the wordpress upload folder. And it's timed, so you don't have to worry about someone recycling the URL.

jmogly

19 hours ago

I use presigned urls as part of a federation layer on top of an s3 bucket. Users make authenticated requests to my api which checks their permissions (if they have access to read/write to the specified slice of the s3 bucket), my api sends a presigned url back to allow read/write/delete to that specific portion of the bucket.

ecshafer

2 days ago

You can just use s3 vis rest calls if you dont like their sdk.

linotype

2 days ago

This looks slick.

What I would also love to see is a simple, single binary S3 server alternative to Minio. Maybe a small built in UI similar to DuckDB UI.

koito17

2 days ago

> What I would also love to see is a simple, single binary S3 server alternative to Minio

Garage[1] lacks a web UI but I believe it meets your requirements. It's an S3 implementation that compiles to a single static binary, and it's specifically designed for use cases where nodes do not necessarily have identical hardware (i.e. different CPUs, different RAM, different storage sizes, etc.). Overall, Garage is my go-to solution for object storage at "home server scale" and for quickly setting up a real S3 server.

There seems to be an unofficial Web UI[2] for Garage, but you're no longer running a single binary if you use this. Not as convenient as a built-in web UI.

[1] https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/

[2] https://github.com/khairul169/garage-webui

everfrustrated

2 days ago

Presumably smaller and quicker because it's not doing any checksumming

neon_me

2 days ago

does it make sense or should that be optional?

tom1337

2 days ago

checksumming does make sense because it ensures that the file you've transferred is complete and what was expected. if the checksum of the file you've downloaded differs from the server gave you, you should not process the file further and throw an error (worst case would probably be a man in the middle attack, not so worse cases being packet loss i guess)

supriyo-biswas

2 days ago

> checksumming does make sense because it ensures that the file you've transferred is complete and what was expected.

TCP has a checksum for packet loss, and TLS protects against MITM.

I've always found this aspect of S3's design questionable. Sending both a content-md5 AND a x-amz-content-sha256 header and taking up gobs of compute in the process, sheesh...

It's also part of the reason why running minio in its single node single drive mode is a resource hog.

lacop

2 days ago

I got some empirical data on this!

Effingo file copy service does application-layer strong checksums and detects about 4.5 corruptions per exabyte transferred (figure 9, section 6.2 in [1]).

This is on top of TCP checksums, transport layer checksums/encryption (gRPC), ECC RAM and other layers along the way.

Many of these could be traced back to a "broken" machine that was eventually taken out.

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3651890.3672262

alwyn

2 days ago

In my view one reason is to ensure integrity down the line. You want the checksum of a file to still be the same when you download it maybe years later. If it isn't, you get warned about it. Without the checksum, how will you know for sure? Keep your own database of checksums? :)

supriyo-biswas

2 days ago

If we're talking about bitrot protection, I'm pretty sure S3 would use some form of checksum (such as crc32 or xxhash) on each internal block to facilitate the Reed-Solomon process.

If it's verifying whether if it's the same file, you can use the Etag header which is computed server side by S3. Although I don't like this design as it ossifies the checksum algorithm.

dboreham

2 days ago

Well known (apparently not?) that applications can't rely on TCP checksums.

vbezhenar

2 days ago

TLS ensures that stream was not altered. Any further checksums are redundant.

huntaub

2 days ago

This is actually not the case. The TLS stream ensures that the packets transferred between your machine and S3 are not corrupted, but that doesn't protect against bit-flips which could (though, obviously, shouldn't) occur from within S3 itself. The benefit of an end-to-end checksum like this is that the S3 system can store it directly next to the data, validate it when it reads the data back (making sure that nothing has changed since your original PutObject), and then give it back to you on request (so that you can also validate it in your client). It's the only way for your client to have bullet-proof certainty of integrity the entire time that the data is in the system.

tom1337

2 days ago

Thats true, but wouldn't it be still required if you're having a internal S3 service which is used by internal services and does not have HTTPS (as it is not exposed to the public)? I get that the best practice would be to also use HTTPS there but I'd guess thats not the norm?

vbezhenar

2 days ago

Theoretically TCP packets have checksums, however it's fairly weak. So for HTTP, additional checksums make sense. Although I'm not sure, if there are any internal AWS S3 deployments working over HTTP and why would they complicate their protocol for everyone to help such a niche use case.

I'm sure that they have reasons for this whole request signature scheme over traditional "Authorization: Bearer $token" header, but I never understood it.

easton

2 days ago

AWS has a video about it somewhere, but in general, it’s because S3 was designed in a world where not all browsers/clients had HTTPS and it was a reasonably expensive operation to do the encryption (like, IE6 world). SigV4 (and its predecessors) are cheap and easy once you understand the code.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=tPr1AgGkvc4, about 10 minutes in I think.

formerly_proven

2 days ago

Because a bearer token is a bearer token to do any request, while a pre-signed request allows you to hand out the capability to perform _only that specific request_.

degamad

2 days ago

Bearer tokens have a defined scope, which could be used to limit functionality in a similar way to pre-signed requests.

However, the s3 pre-signed requests functionality was launched in 2011, but the Bearer token RFC 6750 wasn't standardised until 2012...

Spooky23

2 days ago

Not always. Lots of companies intercept and potentially modify TLS traffic between network boundaries.

neon_me

2 days ago

yes, you are right!

On the other hand S3 uses checksums only to verify expected upload (on the write from client -> server) ... and suprisingly you can do that in paralel after the upload - by checking the MD5 hash of blob to ETag (*with some caveats)

0x1ceb00da

2 days ago

You need the checksum only if the file is big and you're downloading it to disk, or if you're paranoid that some malware with root access might be altering the contents of your memory.

lazide

2 days ago

Or you really care about the data and are aware of the statistical inevitability of a bit flip somewhere along the line if you’re operating long enough.

arbll

2 days ago

I mean if a malware is root and altering your memory it's not like you're in a position where this check is meaningful haha

dev_l1x_be

2 days ago

for Node.

These are nice projects. I had a few rounds with Rust S3 libraries and having a simple low or no dep client is much needed. The problem is that you start to support certain features (async, http2, etc.) and your nice nodep project is starting to grow.

pier25

2 days ago

for JS

> It runs on Node, Bun, Cloudflare Workers, and other edge platforms

cosmotic

2 days ago

> https://raw.githubusercontent.com/good-lly/s3mini/dev/perfor...

It gets slower as the instance gets faster? I'm looking at ops/sec and time/op. How am I misreading this?

xrendan

2 days ago

I read that as the size of file it's transferring so each operation would be bigger and therefore slower

cosmotic

a day ago

Oh, I see my mistake. Those are payload sizes not intance sizes in the heading for each table.

tommoor

2 days ago

Interesting project, though it's a little amusing that you announced this before actually confirming it works with AWS?

neon_me

2 days ago

Personally, I don't like AWS that much. I tried to set it up, but found it "terribly tedious" and drop the idea and instead focus on other platforms.

Right now, I am testing/configuring Ceph ... but its open-source! Every talented weirdo with free time is welcomed to contribute!

leansensei

2 days ago

Also try out Garage.

zikani_03

2 days ago

Good to see this mentioned. We are considering running it for some things internally, along with Harbor. The fact that the resource footprint is advertised as small enough is compelling.

What's your experience running it?

_1

2 days ago

Same as this https://github.com/minio/minio ?

carlio

2 days ago

minio is an S3-compatable object store, the linked s3mini is just a client for s3-compatable stores.

arbll

2 days ago

No this is an S3-compatible client, minio is an S3-compatible backend

hsbauauvhabzb

2 days ago

I found the words used to describe this jarring - to me it makes sense to have an s3 client on my computer, but less so client side on a webapp. On further reading, it makes sense, but highlighting what problem this package solves in the first few lines of the readme would be valuable for people like me at least

JimDabell

2 days ago

I think “for node and edge platforms” and “No browser support!” makes this pretty clear? Those are in the title and first paragraph.

hsbauauvhabzb

2 days ago

I think if you asked the average IT person what those buzzwords mean, you’ll find the answer unclear…

JimDabell

a day ago

I was responding to this:

> to me it makes sense to have an s3 client on my computer, but less so client side on a webapp

The relevant audience in this situation is not the average IT person, but a person who might mistake this for client-side web app functionality.

If you think that something might run in the browser, then “no browser support!” is not complicated jargon that you won’t understand.

willwade

2 days ago

I have a good suspicion this has been written with help from an LLM. The heavy use of emojis and strong hyper confident language is the giveaway. Proof: my own repos look like this after they’ve had the touch of cursor / windsurf etc. still doesn’t take away if the code is useful or good.

neon_me

2 days ago

tbh - english is not my mother-language so i do help myself with copy and typos ... but, if it feels uncomfy please feel free to open PR - I want it to be as reasonable as possible

gchamonlive

2 days ago

> to me it makes sense to have an s3 client on my computer, but less so client side on a webapp

What do you mean with a webapp?

neon_me

2 days ago

he expected to be s3 client on desktop/local machhine

gchamonlive

2 days ago

It's a typescript client it seems. While you can bundle it in a webapp, typescript application goes beyond just web applications, this is why I was confused.

shortformblog

2 days ago

This is good to have. A few months ago I was testing a S3 alternative but running into issues getting it to work. Turned out it was because AWS made changes to the tool that had the effect of blocking non-first-party clients. Just sheer chance on my end, but I imagine that was infuriating for folks who have to rely on that client. There is an obvious need for a compatible client like this that AWS doesn’t manage.

busymom0

2 days ago

Does this allow generating signed URLs for uploads with size limit and name check?

dzonga

2 days ago

this looks dope.

but has anyone done a price comparison of edge-computing vs say your boring hetzner vps ?

EGreg

2 days ago

You know what would be really awesome? Making a fuse-based drop-in replacement for mapping a folder to a bucket, like goofys. Maybe a node.js process can watch files for instance and backup, or even better it can back the folder and not actually take up space on the local machine (except for a cache).

https://github.com/kahing/goofys

arbll

2 days ago

This seem completely unrelated to the goal of OP's library ?

EGreg

2 days ago

It seems to be related to what a lot of people want and is low hanging fruit now that he has this library!

TuningYourCode

2 days ago

You mean like https://github.com/s3fs-fuse/s3fs-fuse ? It‘s so old that even debian has precompiled packages ;)

EGreg

2 days ago

I was talking about goofys because it is not POSIX compliant, so it's much faster than s3fs-fuse

But either one can only work with s3. His library works with many other backends. Get it? I'm saying he should consider integrating with goofys!

yard2010

2 days ago

Tangibly related: Bun has a built-in S3-compatible client. Bun is a gift, if you're using npm consider making the switch.

ChocolateGod

2 days ago

I tried to go this route of using Bun for everything (Bun.serve, Bun.s3 etc), but was forced back to switch back to NodeJS proper and Express/aws-sdk due to Bun not fully implementing Nodes APIs.

biorach

2 days ago

What were the most significant missing bits?

eknkc

2 days ago

The worst thing is issues without any visibility.

The other day I was toying with the MCP server (https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/typescript-sdk). I default to bun these days and the http based server simply did not register in claude or any other client. No error logs, nothing.

After fiddling with my code I simply tried node and it just worked.

zackify

2 days ago

It definitely works in bun just fine. I have a production built mcp server with auth running under bun.

Now if you convert the request / response types to native bun server, it can be finicky.

But it works fine using express under bun with the official protocol implementation for typescript.

Actually writing a book about this too and will be using bun for it https://leanpub.com/creatingmcpserverswithoauth

tengbretson

2 days ago

Not sure about the specific underlying apis, but as of my last attempt, Bun still doesn't support PDF.js (pdfjs-dist), ssh2, or playwright.

ChocolateGod

2 days ago

localAddress is unsupported on sockets, meaning you can not specify an outgoing interface, which is useful if you have multiple network cards.

pier25

2 days ago

Proividing built APIs to not rely on NPM is one of the most interesting aspects of Bun IMO.

greener_grass

2 days ago

Can someone explain the advantage of this?

If I want S3 access, I can just use NPM

If I don't want S3 access, I don't want it integrated into my runtime

pier25

2 days ago

Would you rather use an officially maintained solution or some random package by a random author who might abandon the project (or worse)?

greener_grass

2 days ago

The S3 packages on NPM are maintained by AWS

pier25

2 days ago

Indeed but I was arguing about a general point.

I'd be surprised if any of your Node projects had less than 100 total deps of which a large number will be maintained by a single person.

See Express for example. 66 total deps with 26 deps relying on a single maintainer.

https://npmgraph.js.org/?q=express

But even in the case of the official aws-sdk they recently deprecated v2. I now need to update all my not-so-old Node projects to work with the newer version. Probably wouldn't have happened if I had used Bun's S3 client.

greener_grass

2 days ago

So let's put every package under the sun into the client?

This approach does not scale. We should make NPM better.

pier25

2 days ago

How do you make NPM better?

BTW I'm not saying we should kill NPM. What I'm saying is we should reduce our dependance on random packages.

Bun doesn't need to add everything into the core engine. Eg: when using .NET you still add plenty of official Microsoft dependencies from Nuget.

greener_grass

21 hours ago

- NPM could migrate to reproducible builds of artefacts

- Trust could be opt-in by default

- Dependency installation could be made fully reproducible

neon_me

2 days ago

is there a way to wrap their s3 client for use in HonoJS/CF workers?

zackify

2 days ago

I came here to say the same thing.

Rather ship oven/bun through docker and have a 90mb container vs using node.